Isn’t that a good thing? Should students be promoted to a higher grade if the aren’t doing well. It’s really difficult to do this in California. My wife has dealt with high school seniors who are functionally illiterate. Maybe if they were held back they might catch up.

I'm not making a judgment about whether it's a good or bad thing for the kid. I don't know the literature to have a position. I'm just contextualizing the data.

In practical terms, the states kind of have different definitions of what it means to be in 4th grade. And that's one way of increasing your score on this particular measurement.

I think the right thing to do is intervene before students are held back. But that costs money and might make your NAEP scores worse if the student just squeaks by this year rather than staying behind a year. But I don't have the data on how much they're attempting to intervene in cases where students look like they're going to be held back.